


The Tank

by Besin



Series: World Domination and Other Occupations [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Mutant!Peter, Time Travel is Confusing, X-Men AU - Freeform, mutant!Stiles, scientist!Lydia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 01:05:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3509417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Besin/pseuds/Besin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Peter floats in a large tank, unconscious, Stiles and Lydia talk about his last mission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tank

Stiles remembers with bitter clarity the day he was brought into the Mutant Emergency Dispatch Service – M.E.D.S. for short. (“You will be a cure to the disease that wracks the country,” he had been told. “A vaccine of sorts.”) He’d been fifteen, and far too young to track down unruly mutants, but still he got “recruited” for the job.

That’s just the punchline to his life, though.

He was “recruited.”

…

“Hey Dr. Martin,” Stiles greets, stepping over a braid of wires and into a wide, cluttered room. “How’s our new friend?”

A woman glances up from a wide screen. It sits flush against a large, bubbling tank, wires running throughout the room and light flickering across the dark floor. Inside are multiple bodies obscured by air fluttering to the surface and fluctuations in the water. She brushes a lock of bright red hair streaked with grey behind one delicately pierced ear, crows feet crinkling the slightest bit at the sight of the boy. “He’s doing fine. There are a few fluctuations in the levels of electricity in his brain, but we have no way of knowing if that’s normal.” She turns back to her screen, eyes trailing over the numbers and bars fluctuating one by one. “I heard you brought him in.”

He sighs. “It was a lot easier than it should have been,” the boy admits slowly. “He walked right up to me and tried to seduce me.”

“How was it?” Dr. Martin teases, ruby lips splitting to reveal straight, white teeth. “The compulsion?”

“Kind of generic,” Stiles admits slowly. Glancing up, he points warily to the body closest to the end, breathing mask over their face and bubbles obscuring the majority of their torso. “Sure as hell didn’t have that cut on his stomach, though.”

“Actually, he did,” the woman corrects quickly. “It was showing signs of repeated exposure to a drying, antibacterial substance. The labs are guessing hard liquor. It’s probably been trying to heal for months.”

“But I saw-”

“Did you?” Dr. Martin doesn’t bother looking up from the screen as Stiles glances her way, only waving a hand for him to step closer to the tank. “Take a good look – does that look like the man you thought you slept with?”

The boy frowns, but steps forward to observe the body a bit closer anyway. His eyes linger over the thick thighs and wide torso. The gash across his stomach and the shapely, but modest pecs sitting above it all. And the sheer amount of body hair over it all. “Not really,” he admits after a long while.”

“There you have it,” she tells him with faux sweetness. “You never even saw him naked. A testament to his strength if you hadn’t noticed until now.”

Stiles’ fingers immediately go to the watch wound about his left wrist, fingering the buttons that – even as he presses them – remain dormant. “How powerful are we talking?” he mutters tentatively.

“Moderate,” Dr. Martin drawls. She clears her throat. “Moderate, that is, for someone who’s been on the run for twenty years and coercing someone every night for food and board to avoid a trail of empty bills, which would draw attention. Which is to say on the upside of moderate bordering on ridiculous.”

The boy snorts. “Ridiculous?” the boy teases. “That’s not a measurement.”

“It is,” she insists, glancing momentarily up from her screen to stare at the body as a cloud of bubbles pass, revealing a mostly smooth expanse of pale skin. She appraises it as she would appraise a machine; eyes drawn to details and appendages with all the interest she would give a small cog. “Peter Hale is not particularly gifted. In fact, as far as records show he started off only with a very subtle shadow of his current ability. He matured very quickly; his power manifesting probably in the first or second grade, opposed to during puberty like most Mutants. At first all he could do was suggest things.

“‘Mommy, we should go to the Zoo.’ ‘Daddy, we should have pizza for breakfast.’ Small things; trivial things. Things that keep you off the radar if your father hadn’t tested positive for the X-gene when he went in for a fertility test. But then he grew up, his parents died, and he started using his power to control the people around him. This was about thirteen years ago. Guy learns fast; I’ll give him that. Somehow knew we were coming before we did. He’s been running ever since.”

“Until now,” Stiles corrects.

“Until now,” she agrees.

The boy’s eyes catch just above Peter’s head, flinching away from the bright fluorescent light atop the tank before hovering over a young face lined with stress.

“Speaking of now,” Lydia asks suddenly, startling the boy. “Your age information in the system is off. There’s just a question mark. You’re leapfrogging, right? Back and forth? How old are you now?”

Stiles blinks. “Uh – how long have I been here?”

“About nine months.”

Stepping forward, he leans against her wide computer desk with a slow grin. “Well, I left home during August – figured Summer Vacation would give me a good chance to mess up the dates – so it’s been about eighteen months, my time. I was fifteen then, so…” He draws to a pause, holding up his fingers and counting off on them, muttering, “September, October, November, December, January, February, March, sixteen, May…” The boy laughs. “I’m sixteen now, but after this next jump my seventeenth birthday is in a week because of the extra time I spent here.”

“I’ll set the age to advance manually then,” Lydia drawls, selecting his data and inputting “16” in the window. “There, all fixed.” She pauses, curious. “You know, in ten years you should catch up to me.”

Stiles stares, curious. “Catch up to you? In what?”

“Years,” she replies sweetly.

The boy steps away from the desk, staring pointedly up at the vague figure in the tank. “Hey, do you think I’ll ever find myself here? Like, future-past me? Think I’ll ever walk up to this building and find a way to stop everyone?”

“Honey, that’s in forty years for you,” Lydia drawls. “Besides, if you’d found a way to shut us down you would have done it by now.”

“Being in two places at once is confusing.” At the door came a hollow pounding, and Stiles sighs. “That’s my cue. Back in five.”

“Minutes or weeks?” Lydia teases.

The boy laughs. “Both, I guess.”

“Bring me back a Reeses’,” the scientist demands quickly as the boy steps over to the door, greeting the guard with a sarcastic wave of his hand. Turning back to her screen, she flips quickly through a series of screens before a barrage of video streams flood the monitor. Her mouse hovers on a series of hallway shots before settling on one of the smaller rooms. A heavy click sounds from beneath her fingers and the screen fills with the video stream.

As Stiles is led into a bright room, and his wristband reset by a man in thick body armor, Lydia slides her mouse over to another window and selects “Algorithm 1.”

In the tank, Peter convulses.

…

When Stiles pulls open the door, he arrives in his dark, cluttered bedroom, he sighs and boots up his computer after a tentative glance down the hall. He glances down at his wristband as he waits for it to boot.

“Man,” he mutters to himself after a few minutes of startup procedures. “Computers are so much faster in twenty years.”

“Hey, Stiles, you up?”

The boy’s head shoots up, and he openly stares at the man in the wide open doorway. “Uh-”

“Silly question. Can’t sleep?”

“Uh… no.”

“Well, I’m being called in. I won’t be able to drive you to that thing tomorrow. Could you call Mrs. McCall when it’s a decent hour and see if she can take you?”

“Sure, no problem,” Stiles replies evenly. But when the man tries to bid him goodbye and leave, his voice cracks and weaves through the room like an unsteady bird as he asks, “Hey dad – can I have a hug?”

A short silence settles into the room, and his father smiles. Striding forward quickly, he leans forward and locks his hands around Stiles’ shoulders to pull him flush into his chest. “Of course you can,” he tells him sweetly. “Of course you can.”

Stiles grips his father as desperately as he can without confusing him, before letting the man go and turning to his computer. He listens closely as his father stomps down the stairs and out the door. Before long the cruiser in the driveway pulls away and the boy feels so alone he almost can’t breathe.


End file.
